page_title: Ragnarök
section_title: Theories and interpretations
hierarchical_section_title: Ragnarök / Theories and interpretations
caption_attribution_description: The list of illustrations in the front matter of the book gives this one the title Ragnarök (motif from the Heysham hogback).
context_page_description: In Norse mythology, Ragnarök is a series of events, including a great battle, foretold to lead to the death of a number of great figures, natural disasters and the submersion of the world in water. After these events, the world will resurface anew and fertile, the surviving and returning gods will meet and the world will be repopulated by two human survivors. Ragnarök is an important event in Norse mythology and has been the subject of scholarly discourse and theory in the history of Germanic studies.
  The event is attested primarily in the Poetic Edda, compiled in the 13th century from earlier traditional sources and the Prose Edda, written in the 13th century by Snorri Sturluson. In the Prose Edda and in a single poem in the Poetic Edda, the event is referred to as Ragnarök or Ragnarøkkr, a usage popularised by 19th-century composer Richard Wagner with the title of the last of his Der Ring des Nibelungen operas, Götterdämmerung, which is "Twilight of the Gods" in German.
caption: Ragnarök (motif from the Heysham hogback) (by W. G. Collingwood, 1908)
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